As part of a wave of newly added colleges to TheFacebook Web site in recent weeks, Brandeis students began registering for the increasingly popular service Sunday evening. Much like the already well-used Friendster service, TheFacebook (www.thefacebook.com) is a free, Web-based community in which students at member universities can display personal information, list TheFacebook-registered friends from their school and other schools, and make social connections through mutual relationships.

According to TheFacebook Public Relations Director Chris Hughes, around 225,000 students from all 99 of the listed universities are registered for the network nationwide.

At press time, over 560 Brandeis students had signed up for the service in under 48 hours.

TheFacebook was created by Harvard junior Mark Zuckerberg. According to the site, the service became available to universities on Feb. 4. and only some Boston-area schools joined at first. To have a university added, a student or group of students must send an e-mail requesting his or her school be added to the service.

According to Hughes, who is also a Harvard student, universities are added as often as possible. But he said size can influence the speed at which a school is integrated into the network.

Hughes said Brandeis is one of the fastest growing participants among other new universities on the network.

Hughes said TheFacebook will do its best to add a school in a timely fashion. But at the same time, he said the service gives priority to schools that have more requests.

"I've been anticipating [TheFacebook's] arrival for quite some time," Lauren Abramowitz '07 said. "It looks like a lot of fun. I already have a Friendster profile, but TheFacebook is cooler because the community is smaller and you can see who your friends are."

According to Abramowitz, the service is a good way to keep in touch with people whom one has not spoken with in a long time, but do not feel comfortable enough to approach in person or call.

"I think it's amazing how modern technology can let so many people connect and discover new friends," Melissa Alter '06 said. "I am finding a lot of friends from high school on it. A lot of these people I lost touch with, so now they are part of my friends network."

Users are able to specify other users as friends. When both parties agree that they are friends, they are listed on each others' profile pages in the "friends at Brandeis box."

The profile page contains all relevant information about each student registered. It contains all of their volunteered personal information, picture, friends at Brandeis, and a list of other colleges in which that user has friends.

Some students are skeptical of the service and are not interested in joining it for a variety of reasons.

"I think the whole idea of it is kind of stupid," Tessa Venell '07. "To me, it seems like just a way for people to add up their friends and list their friends. There is no purpose except to look at your friends and their profiles."

John Winstone '07 agreed, saying he wants to meet people and be social. He also said he does not want to spend more hours behind his computer.

According to Dustin Moskovitz, a staff member at TheFacebook, the site plans to add a calendar feature that will help integrate birthdays and other important events into friend networks.

Hughes said that TheFacebook also plans to add a "groups" feature that will allow people to form their own small networks, a feature that could allow clubs to stay in touch and post events on the new calendar.

In order to help students visualize their social networks, TheFacebook uses technology from the Adobe Corporation to literally show the web of connections a student has within their school.

Hughes said that Zuckerburg "wanted to build site that would be online database of information and also have social networks and capabilities."

Now the site has a number of staff members working to update and maintain it. All are juniors at Harvard, and many are taking a semester off to pursue the project.